Driven by the New Catalyst: Sapphire RADEON X1800 XL Review. Page 2

RADEON X1000 series graphics cards, announced back in early October, have started to emerge in shops. Today we will be reviewing the RADEON X1800 XL as it comes from Sapphire Technologies and will be comparing its performance on the new Catalyst driver to that of NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GT and GTX.

Package and Accessories

Small packs are typical of products from Sapphire Technologies and their RADEON X1800 XL is not an exception. The box is really rather small, especially if compared with the huge packages of graphics cards from ASUS or MSI. Its shape is standard, not like the package of some cards from XFX. So what’s so very attractive about the Sapphire product?

Well, the color! The snow-white package of the Sapphire RADEON X1800 XL is going to stand out against the gaudily-colored or restrainedly-dark boxes of other graphics cards. This means it does its job well – it attracts the potential customer quite successfully. Rejecting the already hackneyed fantasy or medieval themes, Sapphire goes science fiction, putting the image of an alien that we first saw far back on the Sapphire RADEON 9800 XT Ultimate Edition (for details please see our article called SAPPHIRE RADEON 9800 XT ULTIMATE Edition Extreme Overclocking: Myths and Reality). Some old-generation gamers may be reminded of the turn-based strategy X-Com: UFO Defense that was highly popular in the mid-90s.

The exterior glossy packaging conceals a thick-cardboard box that contains a tray with the graphics card in an antistatic pack. Below the tray you will find the following accessories:

This set of accessories would seem poor if it were not for that special Sapphire Select DVD. It is a dual-layer (8GB) disc with four popular games of different genres: Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, Richard Burns Rally and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. You are invited to play each game for only one hour and then to choose and register any two of them. The registered games can be then run without any limitations. It would be better, of course, to have four games instead of two, but the cost of the product would be higher then. Sapphire offers you two games and the welcome opportunity to choose which of the four games you like better.

So the Sapphire Select makes us change our opinion about the accessories. They are sufficient and would be even excellent if there were one more DVI-I → D-Sub adapter included (the card is equipped with two DVI connectors). The user manual is blameless, thoroughly describing the installation process in its six languages.